News 080617.1 : Department of Energy, USA has
awarded a fund of $7.5 million ($3.75 million each) to Columbia Power
Technologies, Inc. and Vedant Power, Inc. to develop full-scale devices which
can reduce the capital costs,
operational costs and in turn increase device availability of Wave Energy Converters.Read the full article on

News 080617.2 : After an 18-month
design-build-test competition, the Wave Energy Prize, which focuses on “catalyzing
the development of game-changing wave energy converters that will ultimately
reduce the cost of wave energy” was awarded to Aqua Harmonics.Read the full article on

News 080617.3 : Not all solutions work in all
locations, many can be expensive and are hard to adjust or reconfigure, and the
journey can still be a fairly arduous and complicated one, especially for
salmon, which need to swim upstream to spawn, for providing a passage to the
swarm of fish through a dam or power conversion device installed in the path of
their foraging.

However, the technology developer Whooshh Innovations has
worked with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) and others on an inventive project to create “a new
fish-friendly transport system.” The new technology utilizes flexible tubes and
slight differences in pressure to initiate the salmon and other fish population to move
around obstacles such as the dams in the waterways.Read the full article on

News 080617.4 : Chief Scientist Dr R. K. Kotnala
and his research partner Dr Jyoti Shah of NPL have developed a new way of making
electricity from water at “room temperature without using any power or
chemicals”. The device is named “Hydroelectric Cell” which used “Nanoporous
Magnesium Ferrite to split the water into Hydronium (H3O) and Hydroxide (OH)
ions spontaneously, silver and zinc as electrodes to make a cell that produces
electricity” with nothing except a few drops of water.Read the full article on

News 080617.5 : Recently a document was
highlighting the importance of the water-food-energy nexus for sustainable
development. As per the lead author “Demand for all three is increasing, driven by a rising global
population, rapid urbanization, changing diets and economic growth. Agriculture
is the largest consumer of the world’s freshwater resources, and more than one-quarter
of the energy used globally is expended on food production and supply”.

The article highlights the
importance of forging a nexus and managing both the resources in a tangible
manner will optimize the utilization of the resource . Read the full
article:

News 080617.6 : “Morocco is among the most
water-stressed countries in the world, and climate change, combined with
social, economic and political factors, is creating an ever-more dire situation”. One of the exemplary solution
to this problem is creating nexus by using “sustainable and affordable
renewable energy” in seawater desalination which currently relies on massive
amounts of fossil fuels, that could weaken the region’s climate mitigation
efforts and, potentially compromise the energy security.

According to the SEI scientists “transitioning
desalination to run on, the region could not only meet both its water and
energy needs, it would also be taking steps to increase its climate resilience
and mitigate further warming.”. Read the full article on